UXIdeas blog

EuroIA 2008 kicked off with a keynote speech from Adam Greenfield of the Nokia Service User Interface Design (SUID) team. In his speech he outlined his perceptions of Information Architecture as a practice and community and how it has missed some key opportunities to move away from endlessly designing for the Internet and branch out further into ubiquiteous media projects.

This appealed to me greatly as I have only been working in User Experience for just under a year and already find working on endless web projects frustrating.

However. I felt that his talk failed to offer any conclusions to the problem he outlined. Of course it is up to the whole community to make things happen but I would have liked to hear his ideas on how the practice should move forward, instead of merely stating that it isn’t. Otherwise, this talk got me thinking as I’m sure it did others.

This is one of the most sexual ads I’ve ever seen on TV!

One more post about the Beijing Olympic games! Since the games are happening at late (and early) hours I’ve been following the news from different websites but mainly from BBC and Estadao (for Brazilian Olympic news). This morning I was also checking other websites for curiosity. Most of them follow a similar layout pattern with featured articles on top, headlines, number of medals and in some cases multimedia content. I’d like to see more different approaches for this subject… I’ll try to find some more and update this post later. Suggestions are welcome!

Official Beijing website
en.beijing2008.cn/

BBC Olympics
www.bbc.co.uk/olympics/

Yahoo Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing (US)
http://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/ (Australia)
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/olympics/ (UK)

MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24696691/

CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/

New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/olympics2008/index.html

Brazilian and Portuguese
http://olimpicos.sapo.pt/
http://ww1.rtp.pt/wportal/sites/tv/pequim2008/
http://www.estadao.com.br/esportes/pequim2008/
http://globoesporte.globo.com/Esportes/Pequim2008/0,,9823,00.html
http://espnbrasil.terra.com.br/pequim08/

Guardian’s Map of Olympic Medals

Somebody at our office sent round this link. It gives a graphical display of all medals won by which county at the Olympics since 1896. Wonderfully done. Really like the arrangement of balls into a world map. Balls.

Oylmpic Map

Adaptive Path and Mozilla Labs have launched Aurora Concept Video with their ideas about “one possible future user experience for the Web”.

See below the 1st part:

Nice chart sent by Andreas this morning:

http://xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html

Just read on Techcrunch about cuil, a new search engine which claims to have more 120 billion pages indexed. I’m not sure yet about its accuracy and relevancy, but I did a search with my name and the results are slightly different from Google – and it’s a column based layout rather than a list which in fact I quite liked.

This is what everyone is talking about in the office today… So it might worth having a look:

Truth about smart website

I have to say it’s a really good and simple idea! The website addresses the most common concerns about smart cars!

Great article in smashing magazine about digital retouching!
70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

Chiara Fox posted a very insightful checklist for designing search result pages in Adaptive Path’s blog:

• Highlight the query term in the results.
• Restate the query on the results page.
• Show the number of results that were found.
• Include next and previous buttons, as well as links to additional pages, to move through results. These should be smartly linked; no link on previous if you are on the first page and so on.
• Include a query box so the user can search again.
• Don’t show the URLs of the result pages, unless your audience is techy enough to derive meaning from the URL.
• Have meaningful page titles and descriptions for each result.
• The page title should be the link to the result.
• Allow sorting and refinement tools if appropriate for your users and content.
• Indicate if a result is not a regular page (e.g., a PDF file).